By summer 2017, it was sometimes all the 2014 Olympic figure skating medalist and two-time national champion could do just to brush her hair and fix her eyebrows in the morning — staring into a bathroom mirror she’d raised so high so she didn’t have to look at the reflection of anything below her chin.

Loved ones saw her spark had blown out, but Gold deflected to concerns with her appearance and growing weight. That was easier to talk about than what was really going on inside her head: She was “falling out of love with being alive.”

The truth finally came out at an elite training camp in August 2017 while she was talking with a team doctor over a salad in a cooking class. Gold remembers “just chopping up sweet potato, letting her know the darkness that was in my life.”